


without natural enemy

by arbitrarily



Category: The Queen's Gambit (TV)
Genre: 1970s, Cold War, F/M, Post-Canon, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2020-12-03
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:41:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27844663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: In Moscow in the early spring of 1970, Beth fails U.S. foreign policy objectives, loses her title, and gets a drink.
Relationships: Vasily Borgov/Beth Harmon
Comments: 29
Kudos: 219





	without natural enemy

**Author's Note:**

> I am neither a chess player nor a historian but I am definitely a hack! Historical details, particularly involving the 1969 World Chess Championship, are all fudged to the point of invention here. 
> 
> For [pokemon2000hive](https://pokemon2000hive.tumblr.com/) and your prompt; I wish you the happiest of holidays!

"It was brutal. It's the kind of thing I did to other people."   
THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT

She goes to Moscow in 1970, arriving as the two-time returning champion. She has a new State Department official who travels with her—a Mr. Danvers. Mr. Danvers is a sharp and angular, nervous creature who reminds her, repeatedly, of three things in the following order: it is imperative to U.S. national security and its superior position in the Cold War that she defend her title; it is imperative she does not drink, least of all vodka, as louche drunkenness could imperil U.S. national security and its superiority in the Cold War; and, it is imperative she convince Vasily Borgov that should he defect, it would be in both his, and the United States’s, greatest interest.

Beth fails at all three.

After a national tournament in Las Vegas that fall, Beth met a reporter from _Rolling Stone_. She was at the bar at The Flamingo and he behaved as if his presence alongside her was mere happenstance. It wasn’t. Beth had ordered a Seven and Seven but she hadn’t touched it yet. She let the puddle of condensation grow around the glass and soak through the cocktail napkin. This was a habit of hers now, a game. She ordered a drink and she’d see which would reign supreme: her willpower or her thirst.

The tournament had ended earlier that day. Beth traveled alone. Alone, but not lonely. That was a distinction she made and one she thought Alma would appreciate. Beth had trounced her opponents effortlessly and the fizz of competition was still bright and roaring in her blood. It wasn’t enough for her to beat someone easy, not anymore.

But the reporter sat down beside her and she wouldn’t have known he was a reporter until he told her. He had the same out-of-place beatnik look that made her think of Benny, made her think he had no business in a hotel bar in Las Vegas, so close to the casino and the clinking and clanking of a slot machine on a hot streak. But the reporter told her he was with _Rolling Stone_ , he said he wanted to do an exclusive on her, and Beth wasn’t thinking of Benny anymore. The reporter said that if he was lucky maybe he could talk his editor into making her a cover feature. She was a very big deal now; that was what he told her. Beth didn’t really care about any of that, except for the part about the cover. If she was a very big deal, then _Rolling Stone_ was a bigger deal.

He asked her questions, a tape recorder set on the bar between them. None of them were to do with chess. He asked for her thoughts on Vietnam, on the push for détente between the Americans and the Soviets, on the murders at Cielo Drive and America’s victory in the space race. If she’d met Neil Armstrong (she hadn’t), if she’d gone to Woodstock that summer (she hadn’t; Benny had), and if the rumors were true she was balling Robert Redford (she wasn’t.)

“He was in that cowboy movie, wasn’t she?” she said.

The reporter looked at her as if she was no longer speaking English. She hadn’t seen the movie. She poked at her glass with the tip of her finger, drew a wet line down the side of it. Beth didn’t have any thoughts on any of these things he asked her about. So, instead, she told him what she thought about: Boris Spassky’s performance at the 1969 World Chess Championship in Moscow that past spring. He played Petrosian, who lost to him, and he played her, to whom he lost. His play was beautiful, she said, better even than Borgov.

Her cheeks flushed as she said his name, the same way they might’ve if she had downed her entire drink in one heady swallow. This, too, had become a habit of hers over the last year: she liked to drop Borgov’s name into interviews. She liked the feel of him, his name, inside her. She liked to say his name out loud, as if with each time passed over first her tongue then through her teeth and past her lips, she was staking out an ownership all her own. She liked to know his name would be printed alongside her own.

She didn’t say anything more of Borgov though. Sitting there at the bar, she saw Spassky’s board before her, the reporter and The Flamingo and the Seven and Seven briefly forgotten. She talked through the game play rapidly, detailing with relish how close she came to losing.

“Don’t you ever get tired of it?” the reporter interrupted.

Beth blinked. “Tired of what?”

“Chess,” he said, as if she had missed something obvious.

Like all the others he had asked her, Beth didn’t understand the question. She invited him up to her room all the same, and she didn’t understand that either. He wasn’t who she wanted.

Beth is not the only non-Russian at this championship, but she is the only girl. Woman, she internally corrects. She corrects it each time it is lobbed at her—why not hold herself to the same standard? She still thinks often of the cover of _TIME_ magazine, nearly two years ago now. Beth’s face, all eyes, more demure and decent than she would ever consider herself to be. THE GIRL WHO TAMED THE BEAR, the copy read. It made her feel the strangest sensation, a mix of hunger and embarrassment and something as clawing and distinctly animal as if a bear herself.

At the meet-and-greet that evening, Mr. Danvers hovers at her elbow as she sips at her tea, hot and smoky and nearly sweet.

It is Borgov who approaches her. He extends his hand and she takes it. It’s so easy to look down at the hand that envelopes her own and picture his fingers, sure and quick, manipulating each piece on the board. She feels a similar plucking inside herself; she imagines his voice as he says one word, _check_.

“It is good we see each other again,” he says. His English is well-rehearsed, baritone deep as a radio announcer’s.

Mr. Danvers clears his throat.

“For our countries, yes,” she says in equally practiced Russian. Her mouth doesn’t move, but she grins.

Beth plays well, but not well-enough. It’s as dizzying as a free fall to watch the potential moves evaporate on the board before her. To witness escape become impossible.

She loses to a Russian boy—he’s a _boy_ , young with smooth skin and an unbending mouth and an equally severe spine. Nothing gives in his face or his posture as he traps her in play. Sweat has broken out along the back of Beth’s neck. She can hear every noise in the room as they watch her lose; a phlegmy cough, the scrape of a chair leg, the scuff of a heel against the tiled floor.

She studies the board. She thinks about Mexico City, which means she thinks of Alma. She thinks she is not a girl anymore, but a woman, and women lose all the time.

She meets the kid’s eye. The new wunderkind. The new champion. It’s amazing each man she played and beat on her climb up the ladder didn’t hate her more.

“I resign,” Beth says.

Her only consolation? He beats Borgov, too.

Beth intends to drown her sorrow, or at least her loss, at the hotel bar. This is an act of defiance expressly against Mr. Danver’s wishes, making the entire elevator ride down, the vodka she plans to order, that much more satisfying.

The hotel bar is neither empty nor crowded, and seated along the bend furthest from the door she enters through—Vasily Borgov. She employs the same stealth that reporter used on her in Las Vegas, which is to say, none at all. She sits down beside him. Borgov nods at her, and then, as part of one fluid motion, he gestures towards the bartender, offering him a nod as well.

The bartender quickly sets a vodka down before her.

“Oh, uh, thanks,” she says. “Thank you,” she repeats in Russian.

Borgov salutes her, surprises her again by the nearly dainty sip he takes from his own glass. Beth follows suit. The vodka burns, the same as bitter cold would. It draws a straight line down from her throat through her chest.

“The kid, he is a devil,” Borgov says. There is a mild, even generous, upward tilt to the corners of his mouth.

“I’ll say.” Beth throws back the rest of her vodka, fully intending to have no more than this, one single drink. She stacks her willpower up inside her, as if building a brick wall, the contents of the bar out of reach behind it. She has always done better when she can visualize what must be done.

She does not imagine a wall between them. She never has, only a table and a board.

“My handler tells me I’m to ask you to come home with me.” Beth says it in ice-pick precise Russian. She spent more time on determining the order and the translation of the words she wanted to say than she cared to admit. She turned the words over in her head the same way she might a Morphy game, or a particular opening featured in a dog-eared copy of _Chess Review_. She was very careful to determine if there was any inadvertent secondary meaning to the sentence she would extend to him. _I ask you to come home with me_ —she liked the structure of that, as if they could just as well be two people at the end of a date, sipping wine that left their tongues heavy and her legs willing to part open. Not anything so dry as foreign policy.

“And I am to ask you to stay,” Borgov replies, in equally sharp English.

Beth’s face softens as she smirks. “Well. We both tried.”

“Draw?” Still English. Beth stifles a small laugh. Of all things to imagine when it comes to Borgov, humor never figured. She’s imagined him plenty of ways and none of them involved laughter. Some nights, it’s the only way she finds sleep. She likes to imagine him cruel to her, more barbaric and harsh than she knows the actual man would ever be with her. Kindness is too difficult a thing to fantasize about a man, least of all when you want it easy. Beth knows that.

“You played well today.”

“Yeah, well, you know what they say. You can play your best against the devil, but you’re still in hell for the duration.” She’s resorted back to English, unsure if any of the Kentucky folksy bred into her carries over to the gray chill of Moscow.

Borgov’s mouth twitches, and curiously, so do the fingers of his right hand. As if reaching to parry his own move against her.

“My wife, she is a fan of yours. She saves clippings of you. She says you are smart, and you are.”

Beth doesn’t know what to do with any of that. She fixes her attention on her empty glass before turning her head to face Borgov. He is watching her with close attention, the sort better designed for an untried gambit, for unexplained phenomena, or a lover’s body, pale in a warm bed in a dark room.

“I don’t have a husband,” she says. “But if I did, I’d make sure he was a fan of yours before I tied the knot.” His face shifts into curious bemusement. “Before I married him,” she clarifies, feeling silly. It occurs to her after she says it that perhaps that wasn’t the part of her sentence that intrigued him.

He isn’t looking at her like she’s silly though. Maybe she was wrong about him: there is something entirely cruel about fixing as clear and hungry an attention on her when there is nothing she can do about it.

Borgov’s gaze moves from her. She follows it. It travels to each of the four exits that lead out into other parts of the hotel. He glances at the man in the gray suit seated alone at the small table next to the door that leads out into the alleyway. He even looks to the bartender. He leads a very different life than she does. Rationally, she knows this, but it is so incredibly odd to witness it in practice. Unlike her, each move he makes he must consider as if yet another step on a board marked white or black. For all the care and all the nerve Beth puts into the game, she has never applied it to her own life. She is heedless. He cannot be.

“If this were a different city,” he starts to say, in English.

“You’d come home with me,” she says, in Russian.

Not a bit of him gives, but she knows the answer is yes. Not in the sense that Mr. Danvers would ever assign merit, not on a scale as daunting as global, but instead even more dangerously intimate—the personal. When Borgov does finally move, it is to finish his drink. He gets to his feet, and again, he extends his hand to her. She takes it. His hand is warm around the chill of her own, less a handshake and more of an embrace. His thumb passes over the ridge of her knuckles as he releases her.

“Until next time,” he offers, in English yet again.

There is another word for what he’s doing, she thinks. She watches his retreating back as he slips back into the hotel. Adjournment. She’ll remember their places for next time.


End file.
